


Sweet Cherries

by Imagining_in_the_Margins



Category: 68 Kill (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Restaurant, Awkward Flirting, Bad Flirting, Bartenders, Chivalry, Co-workers, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Himbo Chip, Innuendo, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Oblivious, POV First Person, Protectiveness, Romantic Fluff, Rough Kissing, Self-Insert, Sexual Tension, Sloppy Makeouts, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Waiters & Waitresses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imagining_in_the_Margins/pseuds/Imagining_in_the_Margins
Summary: (GenderNeutral!Reader) Chip can tie a cherry stem in a knot with his tongue.
Relationships: Chip Taylor/Reader, Chip Taylor/You
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Sweet Cherries

There was just something about the bar at the end of a long workday. I could tell you it was the booze or the stools, but I would be lying. I could take a seat practically anywhere in the restaurant, and I didn’t need to be at the bar to find a flask. There was something else about the bar specifically, and he had a name.

Chip Taylor.

As I walked behind the bar, though, I didn’t acknowledge the man silently working away at organizing the glasses. At least, I didn’t say anything to him. I definitely looked at him, though. It was hard not to.

Eventually, I came to my destination beside him and rested a tired arm against the counter.

“Hey, Chip,” I sang lazily.

He looked at me for a second, but then continued about his work. As far as he was concerned, I wasn’t there for him.

“Hey, cherry thief.”

He had timed his response perfectly, having waited until I had already plucked a cherry from the jar.

“You say that like you don’t sneak them all day,” I chuckled back, twirling the fruit between my fingers with a sly grin.

Chip didn’t seem fazed . Without any thought on the subject at all, he shrugged as he responded, “I prefer the lemons.”

It seemed so odd, to picture him enjoying something with a bitter peel and sour insides. But at the same time, I could see it. Something to cut through the sweetness.

“You’re crazy, Chip.” I sighed, popping a cherry into my mouth and continuing to play with the stem. “Did you know I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue?” I asked once my mouth was no longer full.

“Really?” He looked surprised. I tried not to take offense to it.

“No,” I admitted without much fanfare following the disappointment. “I just wanted to see your reaction.”

And, continuing with the painful reminders that he was probably uninterested, Chip reverted back to his silent work in no time at all. I should’ve done the same, but I didn’t. I didn’t really have a good reason for it, either. I just saw a stray glance from him that was probably imagined, and I struggled to find a reason to stay.

“I’m pretty sure it’s actually impossible,” I blurted out. 

If it brought nothing else good for me, it at least managed to catch Chip’s attention. He had a brief contemplative grin, his eyebrows furrowing and his mouth dropping ever so slightly open like he had something he wanted to say. After another ten seconds of struggle, he shrugged.

“I can do it,” he admitted.

“Yeah right.” With a laugh, he turned back to me and almost dipped his hand into the jar of cherries, but found it blocked by my own. He flashed me an unconvincing pout that quickly evolved to an adorable sulk.

“I can!” Chip repeated with more enthusiasm.

I wondered if he actually thought I didn’t believe him. Surely, he couldn’t be that oblivious — right? He had to know I was flirting with him. On the off chance he didn’t, I decided to up the ante.

“Then show me,” I dared just before I stuck out my tongue. I placed the sweet cherry down, curling my tongue around it so that the stem stuck up to him from my lips. And when he made no move besides a confused tilt of his brow, I raised one finger to tap against the stem I offered between my lips.

Most men would have figured out what I was asking, but Chip Taylor wasn’t most men. I should have known better. Any hope of him catching on to my blatant advances was quickly lost when he brought his hand to the stem and plucked it from my mouth with no contact at all. His knuckle didn’t even brush over my lips.

My disappointment was hard to hide, but I think I managed well enough. It wasn’t like he was really looking, anyway. Once again, I was forced to consider the possibility that he wasn’t actually oblivious; he might just not be interested.

Still, if he was completely aware and uninterested, surely, he wouldn’t actually do it, right? But judging from the way I saw his cheeks hollowing and his lips rolling, Chip was doing something to that lucky stem.

Sure enough, within a few seconds, he presented his tongue to me just as I had to him. Except when he did it, there was a neatly tied knot in the center.

“No fucking way,” I muttered, leaning closer to him just in time for him to turn away.

He spit it out into the trash before he turned back to his work. “It’s not that hard,” he replied nonchalantly. 

Then I said something. I said something that must have just been uttered with a flirty, foolhardy optimism.

“You’ll have to teach me sometime,” I said out loud.

Chip’s hands froze for just a split second, his eyes jumping up to inspect the look on my face when I realized what I’d said. What he found was, I can only assume, complete and utter humiliation. That was how I felt, anyway. Although I hadn’t outright told him to kiss me, we were both smart enough to what was usually being referred to when it came to cherry stems, right?

… Right?

There was more silence. An awkward but burning kind of anticipation that left me on the edge of my proverbial seat. Really, I was mostly on the edge of the counter and insanity, but the metaphor sounds nicer.

When I couldn’t bear the silence anymore, I tried to stop it with stuttered, jumbled nonsense, but Chip had the decency to speak at exactly the same time.

“It just takes practice,” he said. He’d written it off like a literal request. Despite how stupid the idea of me actually wanting to learn how to tie cherry stems in knots was, that was the avenue he’d chosen. I sulked in that realization for a moment before Chip made the injury to my pride significantly greater.

“Don’t you have tables to bus?” he droned, “I’m not trying to be here all night waiting for you.”

With a still-crumbling self-worth, I pushed myself away from the counter in an attempt to maintain the little pride I had left.

“Sure thing, Chip,” I replied dejectedly. As I walked away, I swore I felt his eyes linger just a little too long. The feeling didn’t fade throughout my side work, either. I would say it was all in my head if Chip hadn’t been terrible at hiding it. Every time the hairs stood on the back of my neck, I would turn, just to see him quickly look away. It seemed odd, considering he’d basically just turned me down twice within the span of one interaction.

Maybe the secret glances and longing were all in my head. But eventually, he did approach me.

“Just like I thought. Waiting on cherry,” he said out of the side of his mouth that had started to curve into a gentle smile.

“I know you love the company,” I hummed. I didn’t want him to see how excited I was that he’d come back around to talk to me, but I wasn’t good at hiding it. My only hope was that his whole oblivious thing was an act, and he wasn’t a secret genius at reading people. The idea seemed ridiculous, considering he was just sitting there and staring at me with nothing else to say.

“You can head out. I’m almost done.”

Chip, taking on a sudden bashful appearance, shook his head no. “I want to make sure you get home safe,” he explained. 

“You gonna escort me there?” I teased, earning myself a dusting of pink over his cheeks.

“At least to your car,” he mumbled.

“Fine,” I said with a feigned reluctant sigh, “I suppose I can accept that.”

He looked pleased with the reaction but stayed quiet while I finished up what I was doing. In retrospect, it was a little strange that he seemed so fixated on following me out when we weren’t the last two in the building, but at the time I was just so excited he didn’t hate me. I would have unquestioningly accepted basically anything he did, including our walk out to my car, during which he was similarly silent. 

“Well, Chip. I guess this is it.” 

For a moment I thought the night would end like that, as I leaned against the door to my car without getting in. I was too worried that if I gave him an easy way out, he would take it. But he wasn’t leaving yet, and his only response to my statement so far was the way he chewed on his bottom lip.

“You’ve completed your mission,” I continued, resisting the urge to touch him by fiddling with my keys. There was no excuse to. I wanted to, though. And despite absolutely no evidence to base my opinion on, I was pretty sure he wanted me to touch him, too.

“Can I ask you something?”

I looked up at him with a somewhat nervous glance before I answered. “Sure.”

Chip’s mouth hung open for a second, then closed and opened again like he couldn’t decide what he was supposed to ask. I wondered what kind of a question would confuse him that much, considering he’d literally just asked permission to ask it. Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to find out, because before I began to repeat my affirmative, he turned away from me.

“Never mind.”

In a moment of sheer panic, I lunged forward and grabbed hold of his arm before he got too far away. The action must have surprised him, because when I did pull him back, he almost toppled over.

“No!” I shouted at the same time, right before he broke his almost-fall with his hand hitting the car beside my head.

It fell quiet. As quiet as things could be in a parking lot off a highway on an autumn night. The cicadas chirped loudly in an attempt to drown out my pounding heart and Chip’s labored breath. The sheet of ambient sound covered us in the seeming privacy of the somewhat isolated back of the restaurant. It was in that secret world that I found the confidence to request something from him.

“Ask me,” I pleaded with a whisper.

Chip did not ask me a question. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. Instead, he wrapped one arm around my waist and brought his other hand to my face. In one dizzying movement, our lips met in a sudden and completely ungraceful motion.

Kissing Chip wasn’t what I expected. That isn’t to say that it was bad, because it was the furthest thing from bad. There was nothing negative to say about the way his soft lips could kiss me so hard, or how his calloused fingers brushed across my face and guided me back to him time and time again. When his tongue did sweep across my bottom lip, I welcomed him.

He tasted of lemons, just as he’d promised. The tartness of the citrus cut through the sweetness still lingering from the cherries and I realized I hadn’t breathed since he first touched me. But even as I took in a gasp of air, I couldn’t bring myself to part from him, and he certainly didn’t want me to, judging from the way his hips fell forward to pin mine against the car.

The noise I gave in response was something between a shudder and a moan. I didn’t have time to be embarrassed by how quickly I’d come undone in his hands. There was an almost imperceptible smile on his lips when he started to kiss me more feverishly.

My hands that had been paralyzed with the rest of me finally made their way into his hair. It was softer than I’d imagined it would be, and it slid through my fingers without any resistance. When I grabbed hold of it, Chip returned his own satisfied grunt. The noise was less a show of pleasure and more one of submission. I found myself entranced by the thought.

There was such a powerful duality to him that I couldn’t quite place. It was something about the way he alternated between nails dug into my skin and gentle taps of his lips against mine whenever we stopped to breathe. Or maybe it was just the simple fact that he could be so sweet yet so sour, so tender and yet so powerful.

I would have never considered him to be the kind of guy to pin me against a car, but he had done it. And once he had me cornered, he didn’t stop there. Each sound that fell from my lips urged him on until his hips rolled against mine, revealing an obvious desire to do much more than kiss me against the car.

My mind wandered back to the cherry stem he’d tied with the tongue that was currently tangled with my own. I wanted him to give me the same lemonade kisses until we were out of breath and lost in each other. But there were so many other places he could kiss me, and I wanted to experience those just as badly. A wave of heat flowed through me at the thought, and I held onto Chip to bring him as close to me as possible in our current position.

Kissing Chip was perfect, but our time and setting were unfortunately not. I should have known better than to get lost in the could-have-beens before we even left the parking lot. All it took was one terribly timed closing of the back door for Chip to nearly jump out of his skin. He pushed away from the car, and in doing so, away from me so quickly that I stumbled forward in the darkness after him.

It was quiet again between us, although our coworkers’ casual discussion cut through the ambient noise. I watched the terror appear on Chip’s face, and then fade away as soon as their car doors had closed and their headlights had faded, leaving us alone in the darkness again.

“Fuck,” he muttered as he ran a hand over his face. He laughed, although it seemed more embarrassed than anything else. “They scared me.”

I had to laugh too, if only because of his excuse for following me out to my car. “You’re such a good bodyguard,” I teased. It didn’t take long for him to make me feel guilty for it, though. His prominent pout only made the subtle swelling in his well-kissed lips more obvious.

With less sarcasm on my tongue, I tried to reassure him again. “You’re so tough. I feel very safe with you.”

Chip clearly saw through my ruse, but he accepted his fate when I grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled him back to me. I finally got a chance to realize just how warm he really was, and how well his hands covered my hips.

“Thanks for worrying about me, Chip,” I whispered. I hoped that he wouldn’t let it be the end of the night, but I had a feeling he wanted it to be. It didn’t feel like a rejection, though. More like he wanted time to cherish and appreciate what we’d shared before we stumbled our way through the rest of the race to the finish line. I was in no rush.

“Will you let me know when you get home?” Chip asked before brushing a strand of hair from my face.

“Yeah, I will.”

“Cool,” was his very informal response. It suited him well. Before he stepped away to leave, though, he did try again. “Thanks.”

Although a bit disappointed when he started to walk away without another kiss, the distance allowed my brain to function again at a normal rate. That sudden clarity reminded me of something strange. “Chip?” I called out.

He looked at me with a confused and still sort of terrified face when he shouted back, “What?”

“What was your question?”

There was a noticeable pause in his step before he continued his retreat while still facing me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a wave of his hand, “I figured out the answer.”

I continued to watch him despite that dismissal because even when he finally got to his car, he still turned back to look at me. He had a sneaky little look that shifted between a devilish grin and a bashful smile when he finally spoke again.

“I think you can figure out the cherry stem, by the way. You are _more_ than skilled enough for it.”

Scoffing at the lewd yet flattering remark, I shook my head as I got into my own car. “I don’t know, Chip…” I yelled from an open window. “I think I might need more practice.”

His hand on the door to his car hesitated, and for a moment I thought he might come back to me. But then he opened it, nodding along to a thought he wasn’t ready to share yet.

“Sure thing, cherry,” he said, “whenever you want.” 


End file.
